arrange • compose • conduct
Today at the Jazz Education Network Conference they had their annual Vocal Jazz Reading Session. Unlike in typical choral reading sessions, the JEN session (and IAJE before it) features a lineup of about a dozen vocal jazz heavy hitters, who are able to give respectable performances of music that’s really […]
Enjoy this, the likely last recording of The Real Group to feature Anders Edenroth singing. Blidöpolska was written by him as a capstone piece to his tenure in the group. And it has a beautiful story to go with it. As he said in this interview (translated from Swedish) “A […]
We are all complicated, with lots of different skills and interests that we can choose to display or conceal in our audition. Once you get past the question of performing well, you get to a much more interesting questions. Young singers focus almost exclusively on making their audition sound the […]
I have a Snow Day today. (It’s a weird one: there’s no new snow on the ground or in the air, as of 7am…but 4-6″ and 40mph winds are anticipated later.) Snow Days are sudden threats: you can’t prepare and mitigate them in advance, and you can’t stop the weather. […]
One of the best ways to find new repertoire is one that didn’t exist not too long ago. I love to see the programs posted online by the colleagues I most respect. The repertoire they’re programming is, by definition, the repertoire I want to program, and while not everything they […]
Ask the choir to get aggressive with their releases. Rhythmically accurate entrances are much more easily attainable than accurate releases. Young singers just seem to want to…arbitrarily stop the sound at the approximately correct spot. Particularly in rhythmically active music, and particularly when you can’t add a shadow vowel (say, […]
In the fall of 2014, I committed to writing daily. The reasoning was that I was having trouble prioritizing my weekly-ish writing, and I didn’t want to miss too many weeks. A daily habit would be harder to forget about. It’s really true. These days, the hardest days to write […]
You keep your New Year’s celebration. For me, today is all about celebrating Public Domain Day! Every year for the last few years, music from 95 years previous has entered the public domain. 2022 is no exception, welcoming all music published in 1926. We are well into the early years […]
2021 started and ended with huge rises in COVID spread. It’s tempting to say that it was 2020 all over again, but it was palpably different. With vaccinations and more knowledge about effective mitigation, we were able to do a lot more normal things, even as we missed out on […]
I wrote and published every day in 2021, with my streak now standing at just over seven uninterrupted years. This year, I wrote a little over 75,000 words – 6,000+ per month, or around 200 per day. In the midst of that, I also was able to take the entire […]